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In any case, we know of many examples of people “doing something for nothing” in the sense of receiving no transactional gains from the people they’re interacting with.

Maybe we can’t sustain a complex global economy purely on the basis of motivations like “prestige-seeking” or “conviviality.” Surely, they play some role—probably more than most of us realize—but maybe they’re not enough to run the global system that makes it possible for me to be typing these words at you right now.

And…that’s ok. In the same essay, Graeber argues that all of these forms of exchange already exist in every single society, at least in some nascent form. We might be communists with our close relations and commercial traders with distant strangers we don’t ever expect to meet again, with lots of variations in between. If you buy a round at the pub, with the expectation that your mates will buy the next round, are you giving a gift, conducting a commercial transaction, or something in between?

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